News of the week

Elon Musk Says Bitcoin Has One Key Flaw

Elon Musk revealed foresees cryptocurrency as a much better method of transferring value than traditional currency, declaring that bitcoin’s design is “quite brilliant.” But Musk did voice some concerns about cryptocurrency too. Behind his Tesla’s is an idea of acceleration of the advance of sustainable energy. Musk states that “one of the downsides of crypto is that, computationally, it’s quite energy intensive. There had to be some kind of constraints on the creation of crypto, but it’s very energy intensive to create the incremental bitcoin at this point.”

Confiscated Crypto Being Sold by UK Auction House

United Kingdom and Ireland-based auction house Wilsons Auctions will host its first Bitcoin auction in late February. The auction is set to sell off a total amount of about $430,000 in cryptocurrencies, which had previously been seized by the Belgium’s police as a result of a drug trafficking case involving the use of Darknet. The 24-hour online auction starts on Feb. 28 at 12 p.m. GMT and will finish on March 1.

Malta to Use Blockchain for Education Certificates

In Malta, all educational certificates will be stored on a blockchain. The initiative is a project to include all the nation’s schools, including secondary school certificates issued by the state, church and independent schools. The Maltese government signed a two-year contract with software company Learning Machine, to build on the aforementioned pilot project.

‘Samsung Blockchain Wallet’ to Instruct You to Store Your Crypto on Galaxy S10

Samsung is now including built-in crypto wallets on its flagship device – the Samsung Galaxy S10. The phrase “crypto wallet” has not been used during the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S10. Instead, the company pushed the product as a private crypto key storage and an all-in-one blockchain platform called Knox. The official Samsung Galaxy S10 blockchain tutorial on the device shows a native cryptocurrency wallet as a part of Knox called Samsung Blockchain Wallet.

LA Kings Now Let Fans Verify Merchandise Using a Blockchain App

A U.S. ice hockey team has launched a blockchain-based app allowing fans to ensure their merchandise and memorabilia are the real deal. The app uses AR to be able to recognize an authentic piece of registered merchandise versus a fake or unregistered and possibly stolen item. The blockchain is used to ensure the “integrity and safety” of ownership data, it said.

Google Introduces New Bitcoin Keyboard Currency Symbol

Google developers have added the bitcoin currency symbol to the iOS keyboard. The bitcoin symbol, which has seen deployed in a shortcuts app to aid Siri with command execution, is available on the Google Keyboard on iOS devices. It’s unclear why Google has opted to add the bitcoin symbol to Apple’s interface and not yet to that of Android.